Saturday, February 28, 2015

Samudra Kajal Saikia just does not look like a controversial
man. Though there is a lot of theatre in his life, he does not dress up like
one of those theatre personalities whom we see around Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai
or the National School of Drama in Delhi. They walk around in costumes because
they want to get into the skin of the character they would be playing soon. They
just want to feel natural in what they are going to be. In this slow
transformation of self, they look distinct, aloof and secretly adorable.
Samudra, however, does not feel that he needs to be wearing costumes look like
a theatre personality. He dresses himself up like just like any other young man
in Delhi. In the street you may miss him. But the confidence that he exudes
cannot be missed. He is not outspoken by nature but when he speaks there is an
element of outspokenness in it. His subtle outbursts, like the crack of a pod in
distant tree, could cause spread some sort of mild tremors around in the
cultural scene where he too operates and his views could be controversial.
Samudra claims himself to be a shy and reticent young man, who just does not like
to party or socialise. “I do not want to go to attend so many things in this
city because the travelling between home and destination is tedious. I like to
be at my desk, researching and developing ideas and I find the real journey is
there,” Samudra tells me.

We are at the Lalit Kala Akademy canteen in Delhi. I am
already late by forty five minutes. I do not like people waiting for me, nor do
I like to wait for people, so I apologize to him profusely. “There is a huge
show going on here,” he points at the Lalit Kala Akademy Galleries. “I spent
the time there,” he says without any impatience in his voice. I too had seen
the show a day before; the 56th National Exhibition conducted by
Lalit Kala Akademy. It claims to be the best selection of artists from across the
country done by a few eminent personalities as jury members. But when you go
through the works, you wonder, whether the selectors have carefully avoided all
the good works that have been produced in India or they were looking for the
medium range of works. Except a few the rest of the works looks too mediocre to
be claimed as nation’s pride. The floors are filled with sculptures and some of
them without pedestals, hence to watch them one has to literally go down on one’s
knees. Have you heard of bringing a viewer down on his knees by the sheer force
of aesthetics? Then it is here in this show. You may even have to crawl to see some
works. And to make things worse, there is no cataloguing or documentation; not
even a press release. The benchmark for art and art expositions that the Lalit
Kala Akademy has created year after year is exceptional in a negative sense. It
really does not reflect the Modi Mantra, “Make in India”.

Samudra comes out as a fragile but agile man. His hair line
has gone up from the left side of his forehead and the straight hair falls
across the right side. Like his general quirkiness that he privately enjoys
doing, he has some kind of a ‘fashion statement’ in the frame of his
spectacles. The legs of the frame are a mix of pink and red and that colour
streak sticks out from his personality which is otherwise generally carefully
toned down. When he speaks, one could hear the accent of the North East. I am
not sure whether I should look at Samudra as a Sartre-an mode or a Brecht mode.
He looks serious and absurd at the same time. “That’s why I call myself Kankhova,”
says Samudra. Kankhova in Assamese language means ‘Ear Eater or one who eats
the ear.’ In the mainland an ear eater is a person who unnecessarily nags. But
in Samudra’s tales Ear Eater is a demon who is featured in folklore and lullabies.
Mothers in the North East tell their naughty kids as they are put to sleep that
if they do not sleep quickly ‘Kankhova’ would come and eat them. Kids sleep off
instantly. This character also comes in the Vaishnava literature in Assam.
Krishna in one of his conquests kills one demon called Kankhova. Samudra feels
that there is a clear effort to appropriate this pagan demon into the
mainstream narratives of Vaishnavism by connecting him with Krishna. “Kankhova,
therefore is impish and ambiguous at the same time,” Samudra says. “He is a bit
nonsensical too.” Absurdity comes natural to Samudra and his liking for Brecht
via Badal Sarkar also justifies his choice of a nickname or his ‘fake’ name. Samudra
plays up ambiguity, ambivalence and absurdity not only in his character but
also in his performance and theatre works.

Samudra’s name in Delhi’s art scene or in the Indian art
scene is now familiar as he has been accepted as one of the pioneering
performance artists in the country who does not only performance but also
research on performance art as a genre of creative expression. Foundation for
Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) awarded him in 2010 and the same foundation in
collaboration with the Ila Dalmia Foundation gave him a research grant in 2012.
He is now almost completing the first phase of his research and is ready to
face the world with his research findings. But there is a problem and that is
posed by Samudra unto himself. Who am I, a performance artist or a theatre
artist? Am I an artist or art historian? Am I a performance practitioner or a
pedagogue interested in research? “At times I feel that I can jump from one end
to another just like a monkey. I do not belong to this and I belong to that but
I belong to everywhere. This is freedom at the same time a problem,” thinks
Samudra. However, his family’s occupation and his origin in that particular
family would prove that Samudra has always been a theatre personality than any
other aforementioned roles that he has been playing so far. “But theatre is not
an end in itself,” asserts Samudra.

Born on 29th September 1979 in Bishwanath
Chariali in Assam, Samudra Kajal Saikia grew up in an environment of theatre
activities. His family has been traditional percussionists. Though born and
brought up in a rural setting, his family’s pro-active role in the village
culture and his father’s (Nagen Saikia) role as a well know contemporary
playwright and theatre activist helped Samudra develop an interest culture in
general and theatre in particular at a very early age itself. “I was the
youngest one in the family so there was no pressure to pursue something very
particular. I was free to move around and experiment with so many forms of art
and instruments,” remembers Samudra. After schooling, Samudra went to Tezpur,
the district headquarters and joined in a college as a English Literature
graduate student. In 2000, after his graduation, he went to Santiniketan, ‘to
see the place’ in his words. “I had come across Santiniketan in literary works
of great writers including Nilmony Phukan. I thought that was one place that I
should visit. So I went to Santiniketan in 2000 and did not go back home. That means,
I became a student there,” Samudra smiles. Santiniketan is a place for eclectic
experiments and it has always been like that. Though there is strict and
regimented structure in education, it has been open to the ideas from elsewhere,
as envisioned by Rabindranath Tagore, its founder. “Perhaps, I liked this
openness of Santiniketan and I joined there as graduate student in Art History,”
says Samudra.

Why art history? Samudra has an interesting answer for that
question: “If I joined the painting department, the sculpture department would
not have allowed me to do something there. If I had joined sculpture, the
printmaking department would not have allowed me to enter their space and work.
So I thought if I joined art history, every department would allow a ‘future’
art historian to dabble with their medium. In that sense, I worked in all other
departments except in my own department. I would say I was one of the students
in that batch who did exceptionally below expectations.” Samudra’s experiments
with the education style there in Santiniketan enabled him to cut across
disciplines and gain the confidence of other makers of culture, both students
and teachers and established artists living in the same place. This had given
him a lot of confidence to think about a theatre that was not theatre in the
conventional sense but not too much away from the logic of a form called
theatre where time and space made some mutual negotiations. The result of that
enquiry led him to establish the now popular ‘Disposable Theatre.’

‘Disposable Theatre’, when it was established in 2003,
Samudra had a very specific agenda in his mind, which he had even written down
as a form of propaganda. Though it was meant to be circulated around, as
propaganda material generally does, Samudra held it close to him and he became the
sole reader of those points mentioned in it. Slowly he started believing in it.
Today, he says that he is still guided by those principles and ideas. According
to him Disposable Theatre aspires for setting up theatre which is absolutely
against the mainstream national/istic theatre. It is not just against the
traditional proscenium theatre culture or its form and structure; but it is
against the very ideology of linking up time and space in a given frame. For
him, time and space are ephemeral in theatre. And if they are ephemeral why
should there be illusionism at all? “I feel that when time and space are
temporal within the given context of performance and as it cannot be repeated
in the same way somewhere else, each performance has uniqueness in itself. Hence,
I think each performance, however rehearsed it would be and it should be, has an
one time value. It cannot be repeated. It is a philosophical positioning. So
instead of bringing attention to the narrative, my idea through this theatre is
to get all the attention towards the narration, which is variable each time it
is performed,” Samudra summarizes the theory of his Disposable Theatre.

The recent production of Samudra’s theatre, ‘Disposable
Women’ has gained wide acclaim as it innovatively presented three women
characters from Assam’s folklore, history and mythology. Samudra is not
prolific when it comes to his theatre productions. “I produce maximum two
projects in a year. That does not mean that I am lazy or reluctant in doing
real work in theatre. It may further reduced to one production in a year
because I take a lot of time in research and development. While the Kahini
Foundation funded ‘Disposable Women’ took four months in preparation, Samudra
says that he has already taken around fourteen years to bring out a character
named ‘Chitralekha’ for this production. “Chitralekha was in my mind when I was
a graduate student in Tezpur. But I did not know how to go about with that
character. Years of research and peer group discussions helped me to evolve.”
Samudra is not a despot though in his productions he wants to hold the reign in
his hands. “I prefer to select my actors and activists from various
disciplines. That helps me to work with different perspectives and different
crafts. I do not want to create a permanent repertoire theatre. That is not my
idea,” asserts Samudra.

Though theatre is what Samudra experiments with where the
actors’ work is called ‘performance’, in the field of visual culture dominated
by the gallery and museum circuit, his wider charm is based on his works in the
field of ‘performance art’, a separate and evolving genre in the visual art
field. He came to the visual art scene with enough preparation and grit. In
Santiniketan itself he had started working with students from different
disciplines and was creating impromptu performances and theatre works. But it
was then he heard from the peers that there was an institution called ‘M.S.University,
Baroda’. “I wanted to study in Baroda because I had heard about an ongoing ego
clash between Santiniketan and Baroda. They used to say that Santiniketan
produced traditional art history and Baroda did contemporary theory oriented
art history. I wanted to taste and test what was this theory oriented art
history,” says Samudra. Has it helped? “Yes, it helped me differently. I saw a
very vibrant art scene there but my focus was on interdisciplinary acts than
following art history as a focused discipline. I gave my final year Viva Voce
on the day Chandramohan was attached in Baroda, 9th May 2007.”

Baroda generally does not take fresh post graduates to
Mumbai. They are mostly gravitated to Delhi. Samudra was not inclined to go to
Mumbai either. Life before him was looking a bit challenging. Though he was
brave enough to face the world, finding a supporting system was important. Help
came in the form of a friend who wanted to establish an animation studio in
Delhi. After working as a senior researcher for three months in the National
Institute of Design, under Dr.Deepak John Mathew, Samudra came to Delhi and
took the position as the Creative Director of a company he helped to found,
Katputli Arts and Animation studios. He worked as a creative director for seven
years from 2007 to 2014 and worked on producing and editing various short films
and documentaries. Now he is a Creative Director at large in the same company. Though
in 2010, Samudra got the FICA award, it was his Disposable Home project that he
did in Assam which brought him to the public attention. It was huge,
participator and almost became a carnival or sorts and one could not have left
it unnoticed. The art scene did notice Samudra’s activities in far away Assam,
but the mainland responded him immediately by giving him opportunity to exhibit
his works and documentation in the Vadehra Art Gallery in 2012.

In his path breaking performance in Assam, Samudra worked on
the theme of ‘House-Home’. Home is an idea that remains in the collective and
individual memories. “I am interested in spectacles. I want to see things in
large scale. Disposable Houses was an idea that I wanted to execute in a large
scale and the kind of public participation that I got was fabulous,” remembers
Samudra. Interested in the poetry of Lalan Fakir and Kabir (the great Sufi
poets), Samudra took their idea of body as home. He worked around those poems
and developed poems and scripts based on the urban shifts, dislocations and
diasporic movements. “We are all in a way get dislocated every time. Even if we
are living in this city for decades on, though we feel that we are settled and
remain the same, the city itself evolve into something else and that makes us
feel that we also live in a different place. In the case of body it is like
rejuvenation and ageing. Both cannot be avoided. But the memories remain. And I
thought of these memories and created five Houses or house forms and pulled
them along the streets in Assam. I recited some poems. The findings and results
of this project was presented through a wall painted animation, illustrated
book, photo documentation and process elaboration in a show at Vadehra later,”
explains Samudra.

Today Samudra is at a theoretical cross road. He does not
want to convert into an existential juncture for he is more or less clear about
his position though the dilemma of definition catches up with him quite often.
Though he is known to be performance artist in Delhi and elsewhere, he is sceptical
about so many things in ‘performance art’ as a genre of art. “I do not call
myself as performance artist. Except for the Pune Biennale where you invited me
to do a workshop, I never called myself a performance artist. But yes, my
performances have got theatre in it and theatre has got performance in it,”
Samudra negotiates. “Theatre is fake, I feel at times. Every discipline has its
rules. And when we consider theatre and performance art, we find a lot of grey
areas in between them. One does not know when it is theatre and when it is performance.
Performance is improvisational and spontaneous. Still it has a structure. So
basically we need to think about it more in terms of theory than practice. It
is one art form where theory and practice are inextricably interwoven.”

Today, in India, every failed artist is a performance
artist, every other lazy artist is a performance artist and also every other ‘fashionable’
artist also is a performance artist. Why is this onrush to performance art?
There is something suicidal about it. In mid 2000s I had seen artists rushing
to do video art because that was the ‘in thing’ of that time. Today, it looks
like performance. Most of the performance artists do it either turn into a very
exotic act or many of them make it so trivial that it does not evoke any
respect. Some of them structure the performance in such way that they look like
way side magicians. There are performance artists who do it outside gallery
circuit and there are artists who do it within the gallery circuit. What does
Samudra think about his peer group performance artists? “I am disappointed.
Most of the performance art that happen today is very superficial. It is
superficial because the aspiration level of the artists behind these performances
is superficial. They think that it is fashionable to be a performance artist,”
opines Samudra. His opinion may not be taken well by many other performance
artists in India. “Somehow visual artists are frustrated and anything that
comes out of frustration will not make good art,” he presses on. “Look at the
literate students, students of philosophy, theatre students, science students
and so on. Are they frustrated like art students? What are these artist
students looking for? Success? If success, and if they are becoming performance
artists for being successful, then it is a result of frustration. They will not
make good performance.”

Samudra does not attach much of an ethical value to the good
and bad side of performance but he says that art of dejection cannot make
anything move. However, he is appreciative of those young art students who come
willingly, leaving their training behind and try to express themselves
differently. According to him, when it happens willingly it looks good. When it
is forced, it is quite problematic. He cites a recent example of willingness
and unwillingness of performance artists in India. “Recently a few art students
from the flood affected Kashmir came to Delhi to do some performance. I
interacted with them and one of them told me that she wanted to get back home
and practice her discipline of painting. But at the same time, the people who
have been leading them around were claiming that they really wanted to do more
and more performances. It is really sad, “ views Samudra. He is also sceptical about
having degrees to be given away to performance art students. “One can have a
degree or post graduation in performance art studies. It is like cultural
studies. One could explore history of theatre, history performance, theory of
performance, also one could pursue anthropology, history, mythology and
political performance and so on. But you cannot give away degrees to students
who do some ‘performance,’” states Samudra. He would call such a disciple a, ‘Para-
Discipline’ or ‘Psuedo Discipline’. “It
is dangerous. It is idiosyncratic. Yet it could be a discipline in those terms,”
Samudra says.

While Indian performance artists look at west for models,
even western artists are looking at the east for models. According to Samudra,
both the parties are equally confused. By looking at each other for inspiration
one ends up repeating the line of others and it becomes a collecting parroting
of learnt by heart lines. Recently in three different performances in Delhi,
Samudra interacted with the artists in three different occasions in three
different locations and asked why they wanted to do it. “The answer was
astonishingly similar. They all said ‘We want to express in public.’ I think
they have learnt these catch words and phrases and they put everyone in
confusion including themselves.” In another incident a foreign performance artist
while performing got stuck at a projection device. “I found that performance a
flop,” says Samudra. “Reason is only logical. Performance art, they say,
involves space art, body art and performance in itself. If she was doing space
art, then she was not aware of the space; she would not have got stuck at a projector.
If she was doing body art, then she did not know how to manipulate her body and
extricate from that embarrassment. If she was doing performance, which is spontaneous
and anarchic, then the projector should not have been a problem for her. So I
call it a flop piece. Anarchy is a very problematic term when you negotiate a
space. This is where theory comes handy,” smiles Samudra.

Samudra Kajal Saikia is occupied with so many theoretical
issues pertaining to Performance art. Though he has never shown nudity in his
performances, he is sceptical about the idea of nudity. “For a few of them
nudity is a form of body art. They enjoy displaying themselves. One of the artists
in Delhi makes it a point that exposing private parts to the audience is a
must. It is ridiculous. I would say nudity is one of the methods and mediums.
People use threads, cello tape, paper, clothes, furniture and so many other
things as property to do performance. Body is one of the tools, one of the
props. So attaching so much of nudity does not give any importance, historical
or theoretical or otherwise, to that performance. If nudity is performance art
then we are all performance artists because our dignity is stripped off every
day by various agencies. Performance is appropriation and negation at once. It
is all about the problem of doing something,” he concludes. Samudra Kajal
Saikia is a one artist to watch out for.

Friday, February 27, 2015

We forget to see things that are close by. Taking a vacation
elsewhere, after a supposedly hectic year or so, we go to places far away from
our own dwellings that have become less exciting due to over familiarity and
nearness. As we land upon the new place, we start thinking how exciting these
places are; look at the hills, look at the greenery, look at the apples and
berries hanging from the trees, look at those villagers, how good they are, apparently
they lead a very casual and carefree life. Look at the man riding a cycle and
leading a herd of cattle to the grazing fields, look at that bunch of kids
going to school along the dusty rural path, they all seem to be coming down
directly from the heavens, their mirth has an extra cheer in it; look at those
women carrying those heavy bundles of twigs on their heads, look at those young
lasses balancing those pots full of water on their head and ambling along while
chatting so many things. This place must be a heaven. At the other end of the
road, after that right curve is our hotel; is it a four star or a five star
one? Shhh...It is just a cottage? Why, didn’t you search the net for a better
accommodation? Hey children, behave and take all your small baggage. Did you
see those poor old men sitting around that boiler, drinking tea and smoking
cheroots, how romantic, isn’t it? That’s what we generally fee when we are away
from our homes and are on a vacation.

Don’t you think that all those are just illusions? The
places that we visit during our vacations, whether they are in the tourist map
or not, they are normal places with normal people living there. In fact, if you
see it in the right perspective, there is no difference between our lives and
their lives. We are troubled by so many issues that are closer to our lives. They
are troubled by so many issues that are closer to their lives. The man who is
riding is a cycle and leading his cattle to the grazing field is not an image
from a picture postcard. He is doing a job as good as a sales executive rushing
to the clients by his bike on a traffic ridden city road. The children who are treading
on the dirty path do that because they do not have a better road a better
school in their vicinity. Otherwise they too would have gone to schools by vans
and buses; they too would have worn uniforms. If those women do not collect
twigs and dried branches from the nearby woods they will not be able to heat
and cook their food. The village beauties who look beautiful with their water
pots walk miles to collect water because they do not have running potable water
in their homes. We worry for our gas meter going down, we worry about our
overhead tanks remaining dry. They worry about their choolahs and their dry
buckets back at home. It is the same life everywhere different in complexion
and dimension. Fundamentally they are one and the same. The only difference is
in the landscape. We find the landscapes beautiful out there because
urbanization has not reached there yet. We have something to contrast; we have
our primordial instinct of living in forests, completely naked. Hence our inner
core still bends towards nature.

Isn’t it possible to see the same beauty in our own
vicinities, on a daily basis? I am not against vacationing and tourism. They are
also enriching in different levels. But as we know that we cannot go for
vacation every other day why can’t we make our daily lives into daily
vacations? It all depends on the perspective. Once you come out of home, if you
are not directly getting into a car parked at the front parking lot, you get a
chance to see the pathway just outside your home. Generally we do not see this
road, we see the road only the way our car sees it. We do not see our
neighbourhood because we see our neighbourhood only as much as the hood of the
car allows us. We have stopped looking around. We complain that the cities have
become concrete jungles and we no longer listen to any birds’ chirpings. But is
that true? Have you ever tried to listen to the birds’ chirpings? They do chirp
in cities too. Listen carefully, you would see, vying against the honking of
the vehicles, whistles of the pressure cookers, calling out of the vegetable
man, the innumerable musical streaks played into the ears through headphones,
you see the small little chirpings of the birds. And if you listen carefully
you will hear. We have forgotten the forests, but they have not, they still
carry a forest in their blood, in their wings there is still freedom written in
large but invisible letters. We have forgotten the golden rules of survival,
but they still polish those alphabets of freedom every night with the dust of
their dreams.

We complain that the cities are too hot or too cold. We say
the air in the city is too polluted. We say we cannot see a sunrise. But again
it is the question of perspective. The cities are hot or cold, true, depending
on the climatic conditions of the region. But when it is cold we try to run
away from it, and when it is hot we run away from it. We run away from cold by
getting inside warm clothes and we run away from heat by getting into the air conditioned
rooms and cars. And ironically and paradoxically we go for vacations where it
is mildly hot or mildly cold. Have we ever tried to understand cold or heat in
their own terms? Have we ever thought how people in the hot regions and cold
regions manage themselves without complaining? We do not do because we want to
escape. Tourism promotes escapism. Vacationing is a sort of escape and the
tourism logos say that you should ‘escape’ to heaven. That means none of us
want to face reality and we complain that we do not have any palpable reality
left. Look around and see, a few old men sitting around a samovar, drinking tea
and smoking beeris. It is seen in urban spaces and rural areas. Why we get
excited by this scene when we are in a rural area and completely avoid looking at
them when they are in our neighbourhood, just around the corner? Why we call
the urban poor who carry water from a distant tap and go to their homes in
shanties as the bane of urban reality?

It is the question of perspective. To tell you the truth,
whatever you see during a vacation is right here under your nose. You go to a
public park near your home, early in the morning, walk for a few rounds, relax
on one of the park benches, sit there and concentrate on things around in a
very leisurely way. Do not say that the park near your home is small or dirty.
Do not say park near the posh areas of the city are more beautiful than the
ones in your vicinity. The problem lies in comparison. If you do not know a
better one, you will be happy with what you have. So avoid seeking the better
ones and feel miserable. Saying that does not mean that one should not aspire
for a better life and should be happy with whatever one has. That is not the
idea discussed here. You sit on a park bench and look around. You see a lot of
new things. The trees and shrubs look different from that position. The
undulating lawns look so different from the way they are seen from the walkways
around the park. You see a different park when you sit there. You see different
trees, different plants and different flowers. Close your eyes and listen. You
see hundreds of different noises produced by invisible birds sit hiding behind
the leaves. Open your eyes and train your nose. You will experience a fragrance
that you have never felt before. See the eastern sky, and see a rising sun. You
feel so good. Then you once again close your eyes. Listening to your breathing
sound. Do not attempt pranayama or yoga. Just be there and be aware of your
breathing and your own core. Just look at yourself with a pair of fresh inner
eyes; not the way you look at yourself in the bathroom mirror or in the selfie
cameras. You are there. You find yourself. You smile at him/her. And carry
him/her back home with you.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

In his village in Bahraich in Uttar Pradesh, people look at
him with a lot of admiration in their eyes. He has become a local hero of sort
in that backward village. This once run away kid has now come back with money
and fame; he has been even looking after his family and the education of his
three brothers. Akhlaq Ahmad has now come to terms with such kind of admiration
that he enjoys once in a while when he visits the village. But for him, the life in
Delhi is still harsh and ridden with the issues of day to day survival. Akhlaq
is happy that he is able to pursue the career of an artist though his kind of
art is not yet appreciated by the gallery circuit, out there in the street
Akhlaq art has become a craze among the people who promote street art and
amongst the foreigners who look for some exotic visual stuff from India during
their visit. Akhlaq Ahmad is a Delhi based painter who paints in the ‘signboard’
painting style. This article is not about his paintings but more about Akhlaq Ahmad
aka Sabbu Painter and his efforts to survive in a big city like Delhi, not only
as a painter but also as a dignified human being.

(work by Akhlaq Ahmad)

All the runaway kids are not lucky though many of them turn
out to be achievers in real life. Children who run away from home in fact dare
two things: they choose to eschew the comfort zone of family however worst the
conditions there may be. Two, they choose to push their own limits. They are
driven by a strange sense of enquiry. They are alchemists of sorts. It may
sound very romantic considering the plights that these kids face on a daily
basis in the unprotected streets both in the days and the nights. They are gold diggers
and some of them do find gold. One of them is Vicky Roy, a runaway kid from
West Bengal who made it big in the scene of international photography. “He is
lucky and hardworking,” says Akhlaq. “I am hardworking but luck has not yet
bless me,” he says with a chuckle. “May be you have not learnt the ropes,” I
insist. “If you learn to market yourself, perhaps luck will smile at you too,”
I say. But I am sure that Akhlaq would make it big in the coming years if he
sticks to his style and shows inclination to developing concepts that go with
his style. And I said before, his style is that of the signboard painters. It is too colourful, demanding attention in a crude way, but it is naive
and kitschy, expressing some sort of innocence. There are deliberate puns in it
and accidental mistakes; together they make the signboard painters’ style and
Akhlaq is a master of it.

(Akhlaq Ahmad with his work)

Akhlaq did not learn this style from any university though
he is a post graduate in painting from the famous fine arts department of Jamia
Millia Islamia in Delhi. He learnt it from the university called life and its
classrooms were the studios that made huge cinema banners and hoardings. Akhlaq
was not an artist like many artists who say that they had started quite
early. I remember F.N.Souza saying that he did his first drawing in his mother’s
womb. In this sense he had overtaken both Raja Ravi Varma and Pablo Picasso;
both of them were child prodigies and found their first canvas on the walls of
their parental houses. Akhlaq accepts that when he was in the village as a high
school student the maximum drawing that he did were copying some images from
the science text books to the note books. “I was not blessed with drawing
skills and in the village I was not even thinking of becoming an artist,” says
he. It would be interesting to know how his tryst with art happened.

(a painting by Akhlaq Ahmad)

Born in 1985 on the first day of the month of January,
Akhlaq was the third amongst the six children his parents had. He and his elder
brother were close as there was not a huge age gap between them. They
were well off as they lived in a joint family. Once the family division happened,
Akhlaq’s father decided to do some farming. The boys were sent to the farm for
irrigating the field. But like in stories, after playing enough with
whatever was available on the way to the farm, the boys were very sleepy and they
slept off under a tree. When the father came to the field, he saw his sleeping
sons. Scolding, he woke them up from their slumber and father’s ire was so much
that he said that if anything went wrong with the crop they were going to face it.
Hearing this Akhlaq decided to leave home. Stealing some money from home, he
jumped into the first train available and reached Mumbai.

(work by Akhlaq Ahmad)

It was in 2000. Akhlaq knew that a lot of people from his village
were living in Mumbai and he had heard a lot of stories about them from the village
folk. Somehow he managed to reach a place called Lal Mitti Bandra in Mumbai
where his kinsmen lived. They were surprised to see him there but offered to give him work for a few days to earn some money and go back. Most of them were tea
sellers and a fifteen year old Akhlaq also started selling tea and his first
assignment as a tea boy was in Kamatipura, Mumbai’s red light district. “In the
vicinity there was a cinema hall and its name was Alfred Cinema,” Akhlaq
remembers that day fondly. It was on that day his destiny took a different
turn. Next to it was a shack studio where artists made huge film hoardings. “I
asked for a job and immediately I landed up in a job, which was washing and cleaning
the brushes,” smiles Akhlaq. Life became a bit easier then as he started
getting Twenty Five rupees per day. “It was enough for food and other expenses
and I used to sleep in footpath with friends.” One day the studio owner asked
him whether he could take the boards to different cinema halls and bring them
back. “It was more exciting than washing and cleaning the brushes and I started
getting a daily payment of Rs.300/-“ Akhlaq was very confident then to live in
Mumbai.

(a work by Akhlaq Ahmad displayed at Jaipur Literature Festival)

Somehow, Akhlaq was interested to see what is going on in
the studios. It was then he got an opportunity to work in another studio. “It
was a sort of poaching the helping hands from one studio by the other studio
owners,” says Akhlaq. In the new studio, he was given a chance to fill in
calligraphy and huge areas on the board with colour. “They did not allow
beginners like us to do work on board. My initial training was to write small
letters, like subtitles (Jai-Veeru Band- the king of music). The main lettering
will be done by the master artist (for example Jai-Veeru Band) and the trainee
will get to write only the subtitle (the king of music). Instead of board or
canvas, we were given gunny bags. I used to get paid Rs.25/- for this.”
Training went on for months and finally Akhlaq got promotion as a first
assistant and he got the chance to paint on boards. “Once I got mastery in
working on board with poster and enamel colours, one of my friends told me to
go and meet Babu Bhai in Mahim, where he used to run a studio. I got a job in
Babu Bhai studio as a hoarding painter and I started earning money.”

(A commissioned street art piece by Akhlaq Ahmad)

Back home, the initial irritation and anger of the parents
gave way to some kind of rejoice as their run away son started sending money
for the upkeep of home. Besides, he was taking interest in the studies of his
younger and older siblings. Years went by and Sabbu painter became his
signature as he used to be called Sabbu at home. Even then he never had any
idea about Delhi or something called fine arts. “In the studio, other
people used to talk about famous artists and the kind of money that they make.
But I used to think that those were just exaggerated stories.” But things took
a different turn for Sabbu when Babu Bhai’s daughter once asked him to
accompany her to her home studio. “She was a student in Sir J.J.School of Art.
Once I went inside her studio, she asked me to take off my shirt. I was aghast.
I refused to do so. She laughed. She told me that she wanted to draw my body
and it was how she was taught art in her college. I was not convinced and I
doubted her intentions,” Akhlaq remembers. One day, this girl took him to Sir
J.J.School of Art. “It was where I came to know that art could be taught in
such big buildings. Babu Bhai’s daughter explained things to me. She also told
me that if I passed Intermediate, I could also join the college to study art. I
laughed it aside.”

(Akhlaq Ahmad- work in progress)

Mumbai was getting on his nerves and Akhlaq decided to
leave the place for good. His sister’s marriage took him to Lucknow, where he
approached a studio for work. “Instead of brush, they gave me a broom. They
asked me to clean the studio.” Akhlaq’s dignity was questioned there. He did
not want to accept that job. “For the first time in my life I uttered the word ‘artist’
with so much of confidence and I told him that I am not here to do cleaning. I
am an ARTIST.” Such egos were nipped in bud in small towns. Akhlaq found
himself in another studio where a benevolent gentleman told him to go to Delhi
and gave him some studio addresses in Old Delhi. “I went to studios like Jolly
Studio, Baba Studio and so on but they did not give me any work as they were
also running out of job due to digital technique on flex boards.” Akhlaq had a
different reality to face in Delhi. But there too his kinsmen from village came
up with help. Many of his village men were staying in Laddo Sarai area and most
of them were either ‘egg sellers’ meaning ‘omelette and bread’ makers or juice
stall vendors. Some of them were paan waalas. One of his friends there suggested
to start an ‘ande ki redi’ means makeshift shop for Omelettes. Akhlaq started
off his Delhi life as an omelette maker.

( A project work by Akhlaq Ahmad)

One of his uncles was a principal in Azad College in UP. He
told him to appear for Intermediate examinations as a private student. Akhlaq
suddenly remembered Babu Bhai’s daughter’s words. If he could pass intermediate
exams, he could study art in a college. He did enrol as a private student and
to his own surprise he passed with comfortable numbers. Akhlaq applied for BFA
fine arts in Jamia Millia Islamia and he did not get through because of his ‘bad
English’. “I worked on it for a year and next time I applied again and got
through,” Akhlaq joined Jamia in 2008 and came out as a post graduate in 2014.
But life was not easy. He was looking for some additional earning. One day, a
friend of his who was running a cane juice stall asked him to paint a sign
board for his trolley shop, which Akhlaq did. Suddenly, many juice sellers in
Delhi wanted similar signboards for their shops. It was the turning point in
Akhlaq’s life. After college hours, sharp at five o clock in the evening he ran
to start his omelette shop and till ten at night he sold omelettes and then
rushed to do the painting assignments in distant places. He worked till two o
clock in the early morning. After catching a few hours of sleep he got back to college
in the morning sharp at eight o clock. “Nobody knew how I managed my studies as
they never saw me doing a job,” Akhlaq remembers.

( a project work by Akhlaq Ahmad)

Akhlaq was slowly becoming a craze amongst the juice sellers
in Delhi. Everybody wanted an Akhlaq signboard. He started painting, “sometimes
for thousand rupees, sometimes for three hundred rupees and sometimes for a
song,” Akhlaq smiles. He could not have complained because many of them had
helped him during his initial days. Now he started getting calls from totally
strange people of which many were foreigners (the trend still continues). “I
sign ‘sabbu artist’ and add my mobile phone number on the boards. People call
me and ask me to paint signboard style paintings for them. They are all small
works and people prefer to give it as exotic gifts to their friends. I started
getting money and it continues even today.” As he started earning decently,
Akhlaq brought his elder brother to Delhi and put him in Jamia. Today his
brother is a MSc B.Ed and has appeared for the UGC’s NET examination. He also
supports his younger siblings who are in tenth and eighth standard
respectively. Akhlaq wants them to come to Delhi for further studies.

(Hanif Kureshi, artist and Akhlaq's mentor)

2011 was a milestone in Akhlaq’s life. He was in the final
year BFA. One day someone called him and introduced himself as ‘Hanif’. An
early lone crusader for public art and street art in Delhi, Hanif Kureshi, as
an advertising professional working with the brand W+K company, was looking for
a person who could do hand painted typography. Hanif saw a juice stall board
and he liked it instantly. He picked up the phone and called in the number
painted on the board. Akhlaq picked up the call and the rest is history. Hanif
liked his work instantly and started getting public commissions and
international festivals for Akhlaq. With Hanif, Akhlaq travelled to England,
Goa, Pune and so on to present his works in street art festivals. Hanif has also
made a short film on Akhlaq. With Hanif’s introduction and the well wishers
like Jaipur Literature Festival’s Sanjoy Roy and Ojas Art’s Anubhav Nath,
Akhlaq became an exotic painter though he has not yet got his gallery debut. “I
get project based works and also the commission works that help me going. But I
aspire for gallery based exhibition too.”

(Akhlaq with a T-shirt designed by him)

Fame has not changed Sabbu the painter aka Akhlaq. “Television
programs and newspaper articles, and above all the money that I send home and
the support that I give to my brothers, have made the village people to grow
awe and respect for me.” Some of them thought it was an easy walkover and they
came over to work with Akhlaq and learn the tricks. “Once they come to know
that it is not as easy as it looks, they go back.” Ram Rahman, the photography
artist when he was one of the curators of the second edition of the now defunct
United Art Fair invited Akhlaq to do some works there, which brought him a lot
of attention. Besides he has worked in Apeejay Media Gallery in Badarpur
Border, A huge property wall in Kandivili East in Mumbai and ‘IN Box Project’
in Delhi. There are many in the pipeline but his dream is to exhibit in major
galleries. “I have a dream,” says Akhlaq. “Is it like becoming another
M.F.Husain?” I ask keeping Husain’s training as a hoarding painter in Bombay.
Akhlaq laughs. “Ram Rahman introduces me to people saying ‘here is the small
Husain and big Husain in the making’ and many other people have cited this
parallel. But to be frank, I do not have anything common with Husain. He was a
versatile artist. I do not know whether I could claim that versatility.” Life
goes on so are the aspirations of Akhlaq. He remembers an incident when Hanif
came to do a promo shoot for him in the campus of Jamia. “Hanif asked me to go
and sit near my friends, the contemporary painters. They were told that they
were on camera. But they pushed me away saying that I was not their kind of
painter. They were mocking me calling me Husain. I did not know if they were serious
or it was just a prank.” Akhlaq remains silent for a moment. I feel here is an
artist who could go places provided some major gallery comes forward to direct
and support his works and life. Till then we could wish him all the best.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

In one of the rare footages of Films Division of India, we
see a young woman jumping across the Rajpath in New Delhi where the Viceroy’s
procession is on and narrowly escaping from being trampled by the mighty horses
pulling the regal buggy. This fragile little female clad in a white saree has a
heavy flash camera hanging around her neck. With the latest technological aid
we could see that scene repeatedly in slow motion and we come to know that the
woman who was making that daring effort of moving away before getting caught under
the horse driven carriage is none other than India’s first woman photographer
Homai Vyarawalla. Today everyone knows about her and the credit goes to Sabeen
Gadihoke who had followed her religiously in Baroda where Vyarawalla was living
a recluse life, and later brought a comprehensive book on her along with a
documentary film. Vyarawalla passed away in 2012 and in 2010, Delhi’s National
Gallery of Modern Art in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts
did a major retrospective of her works curated by Sabeen Gadihoke herself. It
was a curtain call for her as she was forced to come out of her secluded life
and once again stand in front of public attention in Delhi which once upon a
time she had enjoyed and spurned at the same time.

(photo by Homai Vyarawalla)

In the retrospective, the photographic works of Vyarawalla
had given us a different image about the artist herself. In these works she
seems to be absolutely genderless or gendered to the extent of merging her own gender
with that of her male counterparts, leaving no clues to find out whether those
were taken by a woman or a man. It was a sort of a training and experience she
had initially in Bombay where she was active as a young photographer in 1930s
till the beginning of 1940s. Most of her works published in the public domain
came under her husband’s name for the fear of people looking down upon those images
as taken by some hobby woman. Her works, even then were professional enough
that none questioned the artistic qualities of it. When she along with her
husband Manekshaw, shifted to Delhi in 1942 to join the Publicity wig of the
British War Efforts, she could not have the opportunity to address the gendered
social issues. She was addressing a male world and she could not behave like
August Sanders or Walker Evans with her camera. Instead, she trained her camera
more like Cartier Bresson, looking for the decisive moments. And as we all
know, the decisive moments in 1940s were almost all male moments. India’s
Independence proved to be another watershed moment for Indian patriarchy and
Vyarawalla had to go by rule than being an exception on that front.

(Pic by Homai Vyarawalla)

However, Homai Vyarawalla was not just another photographer
who held a camera like any other male photographer of her times. She was much
more sensitive to her times and to her gender and also she looked at the
flourishing and evolving of her gender from a vantage point of curiosity and
flourish. And we get to see these images taken by Vyarawalla in 1930s and early
1940s in Bombay and Delhi in the latest show titled ‘Inner and Outer Lives- the
Many World of Homai Vyarawalla’, once again curated by Sabeena Gadihoke. These
images are, as far as the oeuvre of Vyarawalla is concerned, from the omitted
section of her works. These are omitted at a certain point because had these
photographs been the rallying point for her artistic excellence when she was
first introduced as a historically relevant photographer than just another
photographer, Vyarawalla would not have received that kind of acclamation that
she enjoys today. Those images that gave her the credit of being a great
photographer were all culled from the national or nationalist moment of pride
as well as prejudice. But the images in this show come from a different
grouping, which Vyarawalla herself had enjoyed taking and preserving for her
own perusal and enjoyment. In fact many of these images have been ‘published’ in
those days but were not understood out of the context in which those were
published, especially in the popular magazines like Illustrated Weekly. These
images had come to the public as life style images (taken by a man) or skill
teaching images or images of good life.

(Pic by Homai Vyarawalla)

The images in this show are constituted predominantly by the
ones taken by Vyarawalla when she was a student at the Sir JJ School of Art in
Bombay. She was one of the early students who studied printmaking, design and
commercial art. She was not only interested in learning skills but also documenting
her fellow students, their lives and attitudes. Interestingly, at this stage,
Vyarawalla comes before as a very gender conscious artist. Her models are
mostly her girlfriends, they almost celebrate their short lived model status
with flourish as they pose for their friend Vyarawalla. These women of 1930s look
so confident and relaxed, and in their cosmopolitan looks and demeanour, we
find them advanced for their times. They look like models coming out of
Hollywood movies or American and British magazine. There is a reason for this look.
Vyarawalla was heavily influenced by the images printed in the American
magazines like LIFE, which she used to refer regularly. The influence is
telling in the images. There are posed moments and purely journalistic moments.
There are candid moments and affected moments in her works of that time. This
is the time when Vyarawalla started to publish her works in the popular
magazines under her husband’s name and later under her own name. Many of them
are commissioned pictures yet many others are the labour of her love for the
medium where she tries to capture the image of the Indian women, real yet not
real and positively desirable.

(Pic by Homai Vyarawalla)

Shifting to Delhi brought an end to Vyarawalla’s romance
with the beauty of her girl friends and their surroundings. But by that time
she reached Delhi, as a woman and as an artist she too had matured enough to
forget the pangs of the easy life she had in J.J.School of Art. Though she
started getting a lot of commissioned works in Delhi, she did not leave her
initial interest in the lives of women in controlled spaces like in an academy
or hospital or factory. She went on to visit the newly established Home Science
Department of the Lady Irwin College in Delhi where young women were taught to
become great home makers. The photographic series done on these Home Science
students meticulously dissect the ideology of home making. Man makes house and
women makes home, was the motto. Man’s structure is embellished by woman’s art.
Home Science department was working on this line. Homai was fascinated to see
these female students giving the final touches to the ‘practice apartment’
where they practiced the theories of home making. These apparently innocent and
playful photographs are ideologically loaded and could tell us about the ways
in which our society wanted to mould its urban women folk. It was a Victorian offshoot and we do not
know whether Vyarawalla was appreciative of this educational pattern or was
critical of it. Or was she an impassionate documenter of events? We cannot say
for sure but one thing is clear that Vyarawalla was interested in women’s
education and she does not seem to be too critical of the Home making education
imparted to the girls. She seems to be celebrating their activities creating
tableaux of homely events, a serious version of the popular calendars that
followed in the post independent years about being a good boy, good girl and so
on.

(Illustrated Weekly cover by Homai Vyarawalla)

In these selected works exhibited at the Sridharani Gallery,
New Delhi, we do not see too many images of men. As Vyarawalla could access the
high society in Delhi during the fag end of the British rule and that under the
newly established Indian government by the Indian people, she could see a lot
of changes as well as lot of continuities in life style. In these images, she
has extensively taken the ‘fashion shows’ in the British Embassy. There women
appear in designer clothes of those times and we could see the solemn audience
sitting without much response to the ongoing fashion parade. There is a sense
of ambivalence in the people who are involved in these pageants as well as the
audience because the time was not good to have such revelries as India was
going through the pangs of Independence or the impending independence. Women,
the side characters of these political charades, in these works, look further
sidelined though they look like having taken the centre stage as models and
charming ladies. It is quite interesting to think that women at the J.J.School
of Art and women in Delhi forming the ends of a confusing spectrum where the
former shows hope and confidence while the latter shows ambivalence in
achievement. These I would say are the Mahabharata moments of Homai Vyarawalla.

(A famous picture of Nehru by Homai Vyarawalla)

The exhibition also showcases a series where a male actor is
slowly transformed into a female character. This photograph is not taken when
female actors were ostracised. However, male actors playing female roles were
still prevalent in folk and popular theatre. In this series, a man slowly turns
into a woman by adding make up and accessories and throughout this transformation,
the actor does not show any excitement of being photographed. There seems to a
completely empathetic relationship between the model and the photographer and
in that mutuality they understand and respect each other’s presence. This
series, in a different sense could herald the arrival of queer photography or
photographing the queer in our visual culture context. I do not know for sure
whether the model was a transgender or not, but those men who acted the roles
of women always had some femininity, which remained unresolved throughout their
lives without staging a ‘coming out’. Vyarawalla captures those moments and makes
them the part of not only the general history of photography but the history of
the queer visual culture in India. The exhibition also lays open the
photographs of streets that Vyarawalla had taken both in Bombay and Delhi.
These streets could be a sort of liminal space for Vyarawalla because they connote
neither outside nor inside. And these are the places where we surreptitiously
play out our inner and outer lives; the ultimate forms of role playing and role
reversals. A must watch exhibition.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Internationally acclaimed artist, Tayeba Begum Lipi could be
Bangladesh’s answer to India’s Subodh Gupta. That definition is possible and
viable only if we take too much pride in our nationalisms. When I look at the
works of Begum Lipi at the Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi, in her minimal
solo show titled ‘Reversal Reality’, I am reminded of our own Subodh Gupta not
because her works resemble Gupta’s works or aspire to become those works by any
means, the feel that exudes from those works somehow calls for drawing such a
parallel. Both of them work with familiar materials and build up monumental and
exaggerated structures out of them. While Gupta’s works play up some kind of
domestic passivity, Begum Lipi’s works do speak of public activity. Gupta does
not speak up for or against any class or gender as his works address the
international audience with some sort of exoticism and eclecticism to support
them. In the meanwhile Begum Lipi speaks up for the hurt class of the society;
women in Bangladesh and all over the world. I think, I should leave Gupta there
because he should not be a parameter to judge the works of other contemporary
artists though I myself have recently used this parameter to discuss the works
of another Indian artist. In that case, the promoters of that artist themselves
had drawn the parallel with Gupta, but here in Begum Lipi’s case it is the feel
that you get once you enter the gallery. But then it is a habit that one has to
outgrow.

(Home, two channel video projection by Tayeba Begum Lipi)

‘Reversal Reality’ is a continuation of Begum Lipi’s ongoing
engagement with gender issues and the materials that could be converted into
art. Belonging to a sort of Mona Hatoum school of expressions, Begum Lipi
started off career in Bangladesh as a painter. Soon her interests moved from
the painting materials to other possible materials that could be employed in
the making of art. The move to shift mediums should be hailed as a very decisive
moment in the career of many artists as that particular move in fact makes or
break their careers. Many artists who do installation and assemblages or
multimedia works today had been once proven to be bad at painting and
sculpting. Many illustrious contemporary artists today would shy away from
their former conventional medium works as those just do not reflect the kind of
verve, passion or flamboyance that we see in their works today. Seen against
this context, Begum Lipi’s decision to move from painting to sculpting or
installation must be considered as a very positive move. Begum Lipi is known in
the international art circle not only as an artist but also as an organizer and
curator; she is co-founder of Britto Art Trust and was the commissioning
curator for the Bangladesh Pavillion in Venice Biennale 2011. She has already
got a few museum shows to her credit. And a glance at her previous works says
that she deserves the accolades that she has amassed so far.

(Destination by Tayeba Begum Lipi)

However, when I look at her works at the Shrine Empire
Gallery, I think that activism could sometimes produce bad art; if not bad art,
loud art. The subtlety of expressions, whatever may be the size and scale of
the work in question, is what makes a work of art worth desiring and worth
looking. In Begum Lipi’s presentation here in the show titled ‘Reversal Reality’
that subtlety is lacking in the major works. The smaller works are exceptions
to which I will come back later. The pivotal series of works that justifies the
title of the show is a deliberately drawn parallel between the life of the
artist and the life of a transgender personality; Anonnya. The word meaning of
Anonnya is doubly important because the transgender woman in question was a boy
once and he had a different name. Anonnya is a chosen name after his conversion
into her and the word means ‘Unparalleled’ or unique. Anonnya is unique because
she is different from the artist or from us. What catch the attention of the
artist are the childhood memories. Begum Lipi and Anonnya are contemporaries and
the disparities between her own experiences and Anonnya’s experiences disturb
the artist. Hence, she draws a photographic parallel between their lives; how
he has spent her boyhood days and how she has spent her girlhood days. And
eventually we reach a two screen projection of two videos that run parallel to
each other. In one of the projections we see the artist digging a grave with
her own hands and in the other we see Anonnya speaking of the trials and
tribulations of a transgender woman in this conservative world. The artist
seems to say that social disparities have dug up a chasm between them and now
only the death could level their social status. The artist makes even a pair of
caskets (which is wrongly spelt ‘cascades’) made up of customized steel razor
blades welded together. These coffins are going to be their final abode, which
would eventually equalize them. Even in death, their memories would be hurting
as the caskets are made up of razor blades.

(When the Life Began, by Tayeba Begum Lipi)

The important question that one needs to ask here is how one
could elevate a documentary into a rarefied visual art work within a gallery or
exhibition space. Could a two channel video projection with one channel playing
a documentary and the other playing a performance make it a work of art? Or the
blending should happen in the eyes of the viewer? What happens if the viewer is
so familiar with this kind of queer discourse and does not give much importance
to the performance part? Or what happens if someone is so brash that he/she
does not want to even look at the documentary part of it? For me, a person who
has read the autobiographies of transgender people like Revathy and also has
seen a lot of documentaries and documentary photography on the lives of
transgender people (I would like to cite the works of Abul Kalam Azad and
Chinar Shah in this context), this documentary on Anonnya’s life looks quite familiar.
But when seen it as being played parallel with the grave digging performance of
the artist, I think that gravity of both the acts is reduced to dust. I would
have taken the grave digging act to Shakespearean levels had it been looped
alone. I would have taken Anonnya’s renditions of her life very serious had it
been shown in a single channel projection. I have to say that Begum Lipi’s
video work and the photographic works somehow fail to impress in this context.

(Anonnya's Privacy, work by Tayeba Begum Lipi)

However, when it comes to the smaller works in this show
Begum Lipi does not fail impress or surprise. A couple of works made out of
gold plated brass safety pins welded together into a handbag and a pair of slip
in shoes ( I really do not know what those shoes are called otherwise) are
really eye catching , soothing and meaningful. They are two intimate objects
that women generally use and the golden sheen is not devoid of the threat that
it implies because the safety pins are sharp and are a daily tool of binding
for women (that helps women not only to hold themselves together but also it
becomes handy in poking back at the probing hands in crowded places). Somehow,
looking at these works I am reminded of the works of Jaipur based Surendra Pal
Joshi, who has made curtains and helmets out of customised steel safety pins
(of which the Helmet was on display in the recently concluded India Art Fair 7th
Edition in Delhi). These works of Begum Lipi look more impressive and subtle
than the other feminine objects that she had ‘fabricated’ out of customized
razor blades. These blades are not industrially produced useable blades,
therefore I should say the ‘sharp edge’ is slightly blunt here. The real
sharpness of razor edges had been on display in the works of Sunil Gawde
(Sakshi Gallery) and Anant Joshi (Chemould Gallery) during the boom years. The
razor curtain of Joshi and the razor garland of Gawde were really sharp and
capable of bringing goose pimples to one’s skin. Begum Lipi’s razors, as they
are not the original ones do not convey the sharpness as they should have been otherwise.

(Long Walk by Tayeba Begum Lipi)

A wig made out of fine copper wires, titled ‘Wig’ is a catch
of the show. One is thrown into a sort of confusion whether to see the rest of
the blonde inside the wall or outside the wall. Where has the rest of the body
gone, one may wonder; has she gone inside the wall or evaporated from the wall?
This wig stands as an emblem to all the women both eastern and western who have
been vanishing into thin air even when they are alive. Their presence is not
noticed or even when it is not noticed it is done for wrong purposes.
Internationally blondes are considered to be dumb sex objects and by creating a
blonde wig out of copper wires, Begum Lipi not only has underlined the
vanishing acts of our women but also she has taken the courage to question the
western world’s stereotyping of women into blonde sex objects. In another work,
by now familiar with the narratives of Begum Lipi and Anonnya, I could see the
plaster/fibre cast of the faces of the artist herself and Anonnya. They are
like death mask that we see in the novels of Dan Brown. One would almost look
out for some inscriptions on these masks but what one sees is the blank grey of
death. In the audio track that accompanies the masks play out some initiation
song in Bangla which I am not able to understand.

(The Wig, by Tayeba Begum Lipi)

The show as a whole speaks of life of Anonnya and also
speaks of her death. Her slow death in the hands of the society is resonated in
the life of the artist. She finds a reflection of her own self in Anonnya’s
life and also finds her own death in her death. Here the death of both the
protagonists is a metaphorical one. But it sharply reminds us of our own
deaths. It is almost like looking at two people who have let their lives open
to debate them with the sharpest tools available (as in an Abromovician act).
It hurts when one sees it alone in the deepening gloom of the gallery space. I
wish the Begum Lipi could have reconsidered the projection size and projection
strategy of her video considering the small space of the gallery. Sometimes,
small screen makes sense. Small lives definitely make sense as in the case of
Anonnya but at times it needs Begum Lipi who has made it big out there in the
big bad world. Anonnyas in the world seek agency of people like Begum Lipi,
till they acquire their own mediums of expressions other than clapping,
singing, blessing and cursing. The show is a memento mori; the good things will
perish, so are the bad things, but the vignettes will remain, constantly
telling us to stand and stare, if not for meaning, at least for knowing our own
nothingness.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

(Only photograph available of Sheila Makhijani (second from the right front) in the net)

“I do not know how to draw a straight line, hence when I was
an art student at the Delhi College of Art, I never went on to do sketching and
drawing,” says Delhi based artist Sheila Makhijani. She sounds defiant at times
as she answers the questions put to her by Roobina Karode, the curator of Kiran
Nadar Museum in Delhi. Causing a great discomfort to both the chair and the
audience, Sheila moves on saying, “For a long time I never used to title my
works. Then I started asking myself what I was doing in those works. So the
question ‘What’ itself became a title. And I do not remember many of the titles
I have given to them,” she presses on. “That means you can re-title them,”
exclaims Karode. “Perhaps, I can re-title them but I will not,” Sheila pitches
in. “Why?” challenged a bit, the curator asks, “Because they already have a
title,” Sheila affirms, quite naturally. I like the give and take and I like
the verve with which Sheila Makhijani presents her case, or rather I would say,
I like the way she refuses to speak about her works. But here is one woman
artist from our times who is going to make it big in another ten years in the
auction circuits and museum shows. After Zarina Hashmi, Sheila Makhijani would
make it, if not in the same lines, but for her small little conceptual works,
which she refuses to be called even ‘conceptual’. She may prefer them to be
called ‘ineffectual drawings’ and ‘boring’ drawings eventually turning into
paper sculptures.

(A work by Sheila Makhijani)

Somehow Sheila Makhijani’s image in my mind is closely
connected with a three distinct images; one, the word image ‘Mayfair Gardens’,
two, a group of impatient and vocal artists namely Subba Ghosh, Shukla Sawant,
Anita Dube, Manisha Parekh, Bula Bhattacharya and the indomitable former
gallerist, Prima Kurien, three, a fair girl with short hair cut, in a pair of
jeans and tucked in light blue shirt, wearing a pair of thin rimmed spectacles.
I have seen several works of Sheila in various shows and also had some
opportunity to talk to her during late 1990s. She seemed to be reticent but
smiling all the way. In Kiran Nadar Musuem, in a panel discussion organized as
a part of the ongoing group show titled ‘Working Spaces around memory and
perception’, curated by Karode, I see a different Sheila; she is articulate and
deliciously irreverent. There seems to be a perennial desire to annihilate the
artistic self from the body of the works that she as created so far. She has done
a wide range of works that includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, paper
sculptures and installations. However, Sheila insists that she likes to draw
and does not want to know what she draws. This methodical madness of the artist
has resulted into a complicated drawings which she calls as her ‘Zebras’, “though
my zebras have different colours,” Shiela quips. One wonders whether she is
sarcastic or serious.

(Work by Sheila Makhijani)

Sheila is severely serious and critical about her own
practice as an artist, we come to know as she talks on. In my view there is a
Cinderella moment in all her drawings. The squiggling and swirling lines
ultimately assume the forms of footwear of different designs. Then they implode
or explode into various directions. However, the artist takes special care to keep
the drawings in the focal centre of the paper. There is a series of ‘Sketchbooks’
which are drawings turning themselves into sketchbooks as the artist cuts and
rearranges her drawings even by stitching them and putting them into transparent
polythene sheaves. There are some impossible drawings that she folds and turns
so that they become sculptures of their own merit but drawings encased in a
different format. Sheila says that she is not satisfied with these works
because they ‘happen’ out of the TINA factor. There is no alternative. Had there
been another way of preserving her drawings, they would have become something else.
Here she does not take any effort to highlight her artistic genius. She almost
presents her creations as a burden out of no choice. It also sounds that if
there was another chance she would have done them differently or would not have
done them at all. Such kind of negation of subjectivity is so rare and it is
something quite commendable as her utterances sound quite refreshing.

(Manisha Parekh)

There at the same platform I see and hear out along with
others what the Delhi based artist Manisha Parekh has got to say about her
practice vis-a-vis working space and memories. In Manisha’s case too I
distinctly hear her effort to depersonalize her works to the extent they become
quite autonomous, without the weight of the artist’s personal memories or
autobiographical twists and turns manipulating their meanings or coercing them
into the minds of the viewers. It is so striking that both Manisha and Sheila
deliberately avoids personal references or anecdotal narratives from their
works. Manisha, for instance, brings up three instances from her creative oeuvre
so far. Firstly, she presents her first Royal College of Art Annual exhibition
that she had done as a student there around fifteen years back. Secondly, she
speaks of the works that had helped her to think out of grids and clustering
and thirdly, she underlines those works that she had done ‘in sites’. From the
very beginning, Manisha also shows the tendency to avoid autobiographical
narratives from her works in order to impart a graphical and abstract quality
to them. Though there are glimpses of her personal memories in the earlier
works, she had taken very conscious effort to abstract them. Like Sheila,
Manisha too draws images, abstracting the object value of things around her and
making them a part of a different kind of representation that universalize the
imagery without burdening it with region, religion, nature and national
specifications.

(work by Manisha Parekh)

Depersonalization in Manisha’s works becomes interesting as
she re-visits the innumerable drawings that she has done over a period of time
and takes them out for some exhibition. Suddenly she realizes that those works
cannot go individually. They have to go together, if not all but at least few
of them. Then the selection becomes another process, which has to be done dispassionately,
keeping the design aspect of aesthetical presentation in mind rather than the
emotional nuances that had caused those works. A considerable amount of
depersonalization happens in the selection process and also in presenting them
in grids. Also Manisha, over a period of time has found out how these grid
formations also could be very limiting as it would become a sort of personal statement
and she would be, at some juncture, forced to find a convincing story about
those grids. It was when she found out the possibility of de-gridding them and
giving many of the individual images a sort of independence by transferring them
into sculptures using armature and jute threads. They look like a set of
magical alphabets destined to be deciphered by the audience. Manisha does not
attribute any particular literary values to these abstract sculptural forms, on
the contrary they appear as form on the wall with an inbuilt possibility of
rearrangement at will. While the grid based works could locate and dislocate
the central focus or gravity of viewing, by shifting the grids to off the
centre or up and down, these sculptural images also have the ability to
dislocate themselves depending on the artistic will or curatorial will.

(A work by Manisha Parekh)

Dislocation is an interesting notion as far as the display
strategies of Manisha are concerned. She prefers the appearance of the works to
be determined by the available space, an idea that she had learned during the
first Khoj Workshop in 1997 at Modi Nagar in Uttar Pradesh, neighbouring Delhi.
The works could be brought in the middle of the backdrop and at the same time
it could be ‘dislocated’ not only to highlight the presence of the work but
also the presence of the backdrop itself. This was one of the instances that
had given Manisha the ideas about her site specific works. Though Manisha does
not claim herself to be a site specific artist, the presentation tells me that
she has done some very impressive site specific works. She gets the ideas from
basic forms or basic people. This also could be translated into basic
principles. Manisha gets her ideas from the basic principles of life; life seen
in a holistic perspective where the thingness of things are given importance
than the external values attached to them. That’s why in her works one could
see the daily utensils and worker’s implements getting transformed into
abstract shapes and ropes and knots becoming sprouts and growths. I would say
these works are strangely erotic also because the hemispherical structures
could be a stand for the female principle and the animated knotted ropes could
be a taken as the aspiring male principle. One of the most interesting works
that Manisha has done is the ‘Lotus Pond’ made out of plywood sheets. Done in
Japan, this work is a master stroke in Manisha’s works so far as it shows a
lotus pond filled with lotus leaves eaten by worms. She envisioned the lotus
pond she had seen in Japan during a residency as a cultural cauldron rich and
healthy but eaten away by parasitic creatures leaving the leaves porous. Light
and shadows play a very important role in this work.

(A work by Manisha Parekh)

My aim of writing this article was to point out how some
interesting women artists of our times deliberately take an anti-narrative
stance and almost annihilate their own subjectivity within the works of art
they create by completely removing the autobiographical references. In a
feminist context, autobiography is one of the crucial components that breaths liveliness
into those otherwise staid works of art. Avoiding autobiography and also not
resorting to the conventional abstract visual language, these artists in their
works initiate an interesting dialogue regarding works of art and woman’s subjectivity.
Should woman’s subjectivity always be connected to their personal narratives?
Can women artists not have a stake in the languages that transcend race,
gender, nationality and geography? Why should women artists always resort to
the very highlighting of their personal life in order to claim a space within
the intellectual and public domain? Can they not assert their individuality by
questioning and doubting their own creativity and play up some sort of
ambivalence in order to understand the creative process as well as their
creative role in the general zone of creativity? Looking at the works of Sheila
Makhijani and Manisha Parekh, I believe that it is possible and it is not
always necessary to do feminist breast beating in order to be out there as
artists of name and fame. That does not mean that these artists do not have
gender dignity and gender politics. The very idea of challenging the norms of
expectation from a woman artist by annihilating such an oppressed subjectivity
is all about being gender conscious and political; a woman’s subjectivity as a
gendered subject as well as a political subject need not necessarily be worn in
their sleeves, they seem to say. But then it is a personal choice and as an art
critic I like their choice.